My feelings

I have been a lecturer for almost 10 years now. Starting from being a trainer at USM, a trainer at PSDC and my current job. I have seen the best and worst of things that a student have and probably I can tell a lot of funny stories. Maybe I will even right a book when I retire.

But sometimes in life, you start to question yourself, is it worth doing anymore. The direction of our education system is really fucked up. They don't really know what they want, when someone comes up with a "bright" idea, everyone jumps and say, hey. lets implement that. In the 1980s. one person say, lets remove the Jawi characters from out syllabus, in the end a lot of Malay cannot read Jawi. Thank you very much. If you try that with the Chinese schools, they will fight tooth and nail to preserve the chinese writings. That's why chinese newspapers still thrive while the Jawi newspaper died a slow and painful death. And now people are repeating the thing with the compulsary pass in History for SPM. The sad thing is almost all the people that make the policy in Education are not educators, but still think they know best without asking the opinion of true educators.

This bring me to the role of lecturers. In the current years, lecturers are not only supposed to teach, but to help with marketing and do ISO documentations. They don't really care how good you are in teaching, but to do as many job as possible to save costs. I really fear for the future of our generation is it all boils down to  mainly dollars and cents. I also can start asking, "what is in in for me?".  Certain students get to study certain subjects, not because they are qualified for the subjects, but they have the money to pay the fees. In they end, they keep failing the subjects and keep repeating the subjects every semester. In the term of dollars, its good, we are getting more money from this student, but its morally wrong to take the money, since deep in your heart, you know there is no chance in hell the students can pass. And its giving them false hope, that one day, I'll be a good engineer or doctor.

Another problem is they set the KPI (Key Performance Index), for example, each subject must have 70% passing rate. While the intention of the KPI is good, sometimes it leads to the manipulation of the grades so the students can pass a certain subject.What happens after that is NOT MY PROBLEM. If any lecturer is reading this, how many of you have taught students who have not the foggiest notion of a basic concept that they should have mastered at the earlier stage, and you have to repeat the concept again and again. For example a loop in programming in the same, its just the syntax. So why is it that I have to teach the look again in Java if they have learn it in C++ or Visual Basic.

My plane of thought was disturbed, just now some students came and ask me something. When I see them sometimes I feel there is hope even though our education system is very messed up.

Talking about messed up, some people even ask the lecturers to become telemarketers, to me that is REALLY FUCKED UP and its an insult to the lecturers., which I am not going to do even if I die Anyway you will see the consequences of this sooner or later. I have an interview next week, so we will se how that turns out.

In the meanwhile, everyone take care ok.